In a distributed system environment (e.g. large multi-core processor), a host Central processing unit (CPU), Bridges, Memory may go to sleep, while the low-power Wireless/Wired Adapter may process incoming packet streams. Specifically, a wireless communication processor and/or wired communication processor may trigger Wake-on-Event and Wake-on-packet-type after receiving and processing the incoming stream in order to wake up the host processor and the other processing platform components, if desired.
The wireless communication processor and/or the wired communication processor are currently unprotected, and as such, open the processing platform to multiple attacks. Unprotected packets are processed by the communication core on “good faith” by a WakeOn engine in the communication core. One instance of an attack is that the processing platform components are denied going into an extended sleep modes, causing unnecessary power drain, and negative user experience for example, lower battery life. Others are more serious in that the platform is now open to additional denial-of-service (DoS) attack and invasive attacks.
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